High Speed Rail (London-West Midlands) Bill

Baroness O'Cathain Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords & Committee: 1st sitting: House of Lords & Report stage: House of Lords
Tuesday 10th January 2017 Grand Committee

[Baroness O'Cathain (Con)]

One of the problems with this whole Committee today is that there are only four or five of us here who know exactly what happened, what exactly the atmosphere was and how we dealt with particular circumstances. This was certainly one which we spent a lot of time on. It might help take some of the heat out of this question if people actually read through the verbatim report of that day, which I am sure is available. It is just an idea, but I feel as though we are being accused of doing down—

[Lord Hunt of Wirral]

No.

[Baroness O'Cathain]

There is the suggestion that we should have come up with a solution. But we came up with the only practical solution at that stage and did not rule out there being another practical solution. When it comes to the tenor of the conversation, I am sure other members of the committee will agree with me when I say people should not be too harsh. It happened on one or two occasions earlier in this meeting today and I decided not to talk about it, but I think we were all really striving to deal with this, and I am sure the people from Park Village East realised that. I just wanted to make that point.

High Speed Rail (London–West Midlands) Bill

Baroness O'Cathain Excerpts

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 12th January 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Bradshaw (LD)]

I shall speak very briefly. The Minister has already said in reply to a previous amendment that local authorities would have substantial powers in organising traffic. I am anxious to have some assurance that HS2 Ltd will not, as it were, have overriding powers which prevent the proper processes taking place.

[Baroness O'Cathain (Con)]

My Lords, perhaps we could probe this amendment. A lot of the work that we did on the Select Committee referred to HS1, Crossrail and the tunnel. With all his expertise and knowledge, can the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, tell me whether this actually occurred in the case of HS1—the Channel Tunnel route—and Crossrail? Perhaps we should benefit from that, because we frequently went back to the experience of those two projects. There was no point to going through them if you were not going to get some learning from them. Are we trying to reinvent the wheel here or was there a separate way of doing it, which the noble Lord thinks was not good enough and is why he has tabled this amendment?

[Lord Berkeley]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness for that question because she is absolutely right to seek a precedent for this. Of the projects that I have been involved in, the Channel Tunnel was of course just in Kent so the discussions were with its highway authority, which was Kent County Council. HS1 was to a large extent in Kent and then in London. It was cut into two halves; again, Kent County Council was the highways authority and we talked a lot about transport, the mitigation, routes and everything else there. I think it did very well on that. Crossrail is of course not entirely within the TfL area but quite a lot is. Most of the discussions on transport took place, as I recall, with Transport for London. When Crossrail gets outside London, it mainly runs on existing railways so the problem is less acute.

What we have here, as we discussed previously, is a much longer route—200 kilometres long—which goes between two pretty massive conurbations: London and the West Midlands. As I think I mentioned the other day, there are several motorways and national railways to cross. It would be a shame if the motorways were all closed at the same time. I am sure they would not be, but they should not be. This is why I said, in my opening remarks, that maybe there should be three of these different, smaller co-ordination centres: one for the West Midlands, one for the London area and one for the middle bit. Again, it may seem bureaucratic, but it will mean less work to do. It is just a suggestion, and the Minister may say, “We are doing it anyway”. In that case, it is absolutely fine. I hope that is helpful.

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[Lord Young of Norwood Green]

I am afraid that we will have to agree to disagree, because they did have the opportunity to make wider points on many issues. On the fact that my noble friend was stopped from speaking, I cannot remember precisely why, but it may well be that we had heard those points on many occasions and reiteration did not necessarily produce a better impact for the committee. However, again, I refute the idea that my noble friend is promoting: that this was an unfair environment in which petitioners were not able to address the wider case. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Walker, was meticulous in allowing people to develop the whole case even though we had heard the same issue on many occasions, whether it was the requirement for extra tunnelling or a whole range of issues. Inevitably, if you look at the geography of the petitioners, we heard the same case again and again.

I am not saying that the Select Committee procedure was perfect but I refute that petitioners did not have the opportunity to make their case and address the wider issues. They did. We heard them and wherever we could, if anything, we leaned towards the petitioners. We knew that if people had taken the time and trouble to come to Westminster to make their case, they were entitled to a fair hearing. In fact, the pressure was more on the promoters to prove that the petitioners were wrong than the other way round.

[Baroness O'Cathain]

My Lords, I must correct two points that my noble friend made. The first was that the HS2 people did not communicate with the residents of various places. They held meetings and sent leaflets and the response was totally pathetic, particularly in the Camden area. It is not unreasonable to think that the response would be pathetic, because we were talking about something that would not go through their patch for seven years, so people thought, “I can’t really be bothered”. That was the information we got from HS2, and the petitioners did not correct us on it.

Secondly, on a point I made on Tuesday, in numerical terms we had over 100 meetings and produced a 60,000-word report, and the verbatim of all those meetings is available. It would be jolly nice if noble Lords tried to look at the various areas about which petitioners now say, “Well, of course they didn’t listen” or “They didn’t do this”. We bent over backwards, to the extent that sometimes I felt that HS2 would get fed up with the committee members trying to understand the various differences between the petitioners. There was just one QC who flung the file at Mr Mould, the HS2 barrister, because he simply could not understand his way of thinking, and that was wrong.

The noble Lord, Lord Young, has explained it completely. I feel utterly traduced, having spent all that time on it. We worked from May through to December, relentlessly, four days a week. We did our best. The noble Lord and I were both worn out. I think I remember him saying, “If I die, Wendover will be written on my heart.” On another occasion, he said, “If I ever hear of Wendover again, I will go mad.” We spent hours on Wendover, and on the Chilterns—and then the noble Viscount, Lord Astor, said that there should not be a tunnel anyway because the people who travel on the train want to see the scenery. To hear this kind of thing after all the work we have done frankly made me want to give up. I lost the will to live at one stage. It had an effect on us. We were getting colds. We were tired. Our weekends were spent in a daze wondering how to recover. I am not trying to plead a special case, but to hear this sort of stuff coming out is not at all rewarding to people who went there, unpaid, and gave up a huge amount of their private life for it.

[Lord Berkeley]

Noble Lords will be aware that there was a consultation on the hybrid Bill procedure, which closed just before Christmas and on which the clerks can provide us all with details. I think that is the forum for discussing how the procedure works, whether improvements could be made, whether everybody was treated fairly, and so on. I suspect it will be the first of a number of inquiries. We all learn from these processes, but I am not sure that today’s Committee is the right forum in which to discuss them in detail.

High Speed Rail (London-West Midlands) Bill

Baroness O'Cathain Excerpts

Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 24th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Snape (Lab)]

My Lords, I find it somewhat bizarre that we should be discussing these particular amendments at this particular time. I find it even more bizarre that these amendments should be moved by the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, and my noble friend Lord Berkeley—both of whom are normally extremely supportive of railway matters. The effect of accepting either or both these amendments, as I am sure the Minister will tell us, would be to delay considerably the project as a whole. I am sure that that is not the noble Lord’s intention, but I hope he will agree with me that that would be the result. He shakes his head—he can come back to me on that in a moment.

I do not think that you could have a re-costing of a project this size and then say, “We will have Third Reading of the Bill in a week’s time, and that’s the end of it”. If the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, is saying that, he is an even bigger financial genius than I thought he was previously. The fact is that there would be further delay. It is seven years since my noble friend Lord Adonis, as a Minister in the last Government but one, came forward with the project—and here we are at the end of a seven-year period discussing two amendments that would, I would guess, have the effect if not of putting the project back another seven years then certainly putting it back for some considerable time.

As far as Old Oak Common is concerned, I say again to the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, that he has to answer the point put by the noble Lord, Lord Brabazon, a former Transport Minister. The fact is that Old Oak, as it presently is, is in no way suitable to be a main terminal. I do not mean to be facetious when I say that if you asked people coming to London where they were going to when they got there, comparatively few would say Old Oak. In Great Western days there was a steam engine shed there, I understand, so trainspotters might well have gone there 50 years ago—but I cannot see there being a great demand to terminate trains at Old Oak, no matter how good the connections will be.

The noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, talked about developments at Euston. He has an amendment which I am sure we will be discussing later about access around Euston station, which is the natural terminus. He makes the very relevant point that, for example, on the TGV in France, high-speed trains stop short of the main terminus, which is the reason for the delays that quite often occur. It seems to me to be a much more sensible engineering prospect to run high-speed trains into the centre of a city rather than making them share crowded tracks with other trains, as they do in other countries. So perhaps on this occasion we got it right.

Finally, whatever estimates are made of these projects often turn out, in the long term, to be unrealistic. My noble friend talked about Crossrail. I was on the Crossrail Bill, and it was said at that time that the estimates for Crossrail were unrealistic—but they proved not to be so. With all due respect to my noble friend’s opinion, he is no better a financier than the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, as far as this project is concerned. So if the noble Lord presses this to a Division, I hope that those of us who want to see this project, after seven years, get the go-ahead will vote in the Not-Content Lobby.

[Baroness O'Cathain (Con)]

My Lords, I am disturbed that this amendment has come up because, first of all, we have no figures for people who would be very pleased to be dispersed—as the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, said—at Old Oak Common. Having been to Old Oak Common on one of our visits, I would not like to be lumbered with getting from Old Oak Common to anywhere in London; it just seems crazy. Secondly, the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, said that the forecasts were not up to date. He also cast aspersions on the people who did the forecasts. He said that the forecasts were prepared by people who were not capable and that they were flimsy. This is really too late in the project to make those sorts of comments.

The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, said that he was interested in financial discipline; we are all interested in financial discipline. But not making any forecasts of the people who would be,

“dispersed from Old Oak Common”,

just does not make sense. It seems to me to be a delaying tactic, without actually getting the basis of proper forecasts of people who are going to use Old Oak Common. Coming from Birmingham to Old Oak Common? I ask: who would really want to?

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[Lord Young of Norwood Green]

My Lords, I am surprised that yet again we are exploring the wonders of Wendover—which was one of the many exotic foreign trips we went on. It was important that we went out to see these places. I think it was a slight exaggeration when the noble Baroness, Lady Pidding, said that the area of outstanding natural beauty would be destroyed. There will be changes, but I do not believe that the area will be destroyed—and neither do members of the committee.

I return to the point made by my noble friend Lord Stevenson, who says, yet again, that we have not fully and transparently explored this issue. In fact we did—and of course it was done not only by us but by the Commons, who after two years of hearing petitions extended the tunnel by a significant amount. The next challenge that was put to us when we examined this in Committee was a challenge to the promoters’ assessment of tunnelling costs: “They would say that, wouldn’t they? They would make them come out cheaper”. The integrity of that costing procedure was disputed. In a way, that was a useful challenge, because we needed to be assured that that costing gave us a fair and accurate cost comparison of whether extending tunnelling even further—whether it was mined or bored—would achieve savings, which my noble friend Lord Berkeley also insisted would be the case.

That was a legitimate question until we got to the point of the proposed Colne Valley viaduct, where petitioners were asking for a fully bored tunnel instead of a viaduct. Those HS2 tunnelling costs were assessed in an independent cost analysis and were validated. So the idea that at this stage we have not had a full debate on this is preposterous, given everything that has happened—and, again, the idea that the public interest has not been protected is fallacious.

It is true to say—perhaps it is the one point on which I agree with my noble friend—that the hybrid Bill process is not ideal. We and the Commons agreed on that. As a committee we put in our view of how this Victorian process, as my noble friend rightly called it, could be improved. But that is one thing; it does not take away the main point of this amendment, which somehow seems to suggest to the House that, first, the public interest has not been fully served, and, secondly, that this has been a flawed process. I and the rest of my committee colleagues do not believe that to be the case. Again, I trust that noble Lords will reject this amendment.

[Baroness O'Cathain]

Maybe my memory is deceiving me, but the mined tunnel was through chalk, was it not? There was a problem about the slurry and it would not have been a practical proposition to go through—rather than a bored tunnel. I would like clarification on that, specifically the mined tunnel. Can the noble Lord, Lord Young, help me?

[Lord Young of Norwood Green]

No, I am not going to because I have just remembered that Peers are allowed only one contribution on an amendment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Randerson]

My Lords, Amendment 8 is in my name and that of the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley. It seeks to reduce the impact of many years of construction work on the residents of Euston and on our environment generally. In the light of earlier amendments, there is no way in which this amendment could be argued to be delaying anything going ahead with HS2. It is a detail relating to the operation of construction works. It is clear from the committee’s report, which goes into this issue in great detail, that it has concluded that the impact of construction works on the Euston area will be massive. We discussed the issue of compensation in Grand Committee, when the Minister said that he hoped to be in a position to produce further information about the compensation scheme that the Government are considering for the Euston area. Is he able to give us further information now?

In Committee, we put down an amendment that dealt with the transport of materials along the whole line but today we are concentrating on Euston, which is where the impact will be greatest. However, I argue that the same principles should apply throughout the whole project. Put simply, this amendment seeks to reduce the impact of construction on the beleaguered residents of Euston and the surrounding area by reducing the quantity of spoil and construction materials carried by road. The committee itself noted that areas of Camden suffer levels of air pollution well in excess of EU limits, which is a compelling reason to choose to transport by rail whenever possible.

The Euston area will suffer from more than a decade of disruption. Homes will be demolished, as well as a large office block, so there will be a lot of spoil as well as the building materials required for the new part of the station and the line itself. Your Lordships should bear in mind that after the HS2 part of the station is built, residents face disruption from the promised rebuilding of the existing station. The committee’s report notes that the shortest journey by road from Euston to the nearest landfill site is 26 miles, one way. As I said in Committee, one train can move as much material as 124 HGV lorries so the argument is very strong: as much material as possible must go by rail. If not by rail, it needs to go by river, which would of course necessitate putting the spoil or material into a lorry first to take it to the Thames. It would therefore not be as good as putting it straight on the railway.

HS2 is currently committed to moving 28% of excavated soil and 17% of construction materials by rail. It simply must do much better than that. Disappointingly, the committee did not recommend targets but major recent construction projects demonstrate that it is reasonable to expect a much higher percentage to go by rail. I give the House the examples of the Olympics, the tideway tunnel and Crossrail as construction projects which have been very successful in transporting by rail. Crossrail managed 80%, so the 50% target in our amendment is not that ambitious if looked at in that way. These figures are certainly not plucked from the air, as the Minister suggested in his response in Committee, but based on previous large construction projects and what could be reasonably expected.

In his response in Committee, the Minister also warned of the potential disruption to other rail services of using freight trains for this work. At the rate I quoted, with one train potentially carrying the load of 124 HGVs, we are talking about a small number of trains per day—say four or five. That is as nothing compared to the disruption to London traffic from many hundreds of HGVs every day. The Minister told us that it was premature to set targets but I was certainly not clear from his answer whether the Government intend to set targets at any stage. I believe that targets are a useful tool for encouraging HS2 to think more ambitiously. I am not clear whether HS2 is going to set the maximisation of spoil removal by rail as a requirement of its contracts with contractors. I am interested in whether the Government consider that this is something that they should be doing. There is also the issue of the control of subcontractors. Corners are often cut in large construction projects at this level.

I am certainly not arguing that transport by rail is the only measure needed. There are many others, as the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, indicated in Committee. As yet, there are few signs that HS2 is taking the holistic approach to environmentally friendly construction that is desperately needed at this complex and congested site. Best practice at other large construction sites in central London demonstrates that this is perfectly feasible. TfL is leading the way in working with other contractors. For example, at one large building site near the Shard, it is estimated that 876 HGV trips were saved by a variety of other complementary measures. On its own, each one is simple and common sense, but easily ignored in the pressures of a large project where the requirement is to cut costs and keep to time. I am talking about limiting the empty running of vehicles by ensuring that reverse loads are available. There is the use of consolidation centres, so that lorries always arrive on site absolutely full. Of great importance to Camden residents will be strict enforcement of rules to prevent the running of engines in stationary vehicles. Fundamental to all this is the better use of arisings, such as the recycling of concrete and the better use of inert earth, for example for flood defences and landscaping.

All this requires imagination and co-operation, not just between HS2 and its contractors, but with other development sites and other local authorities. So far, the stated aims of HS2, the responses of the Minister and the evidence of the committee’s report, have not convinced me that HS2 is prepared to push the boundaries of best practice. This is what they need to do, because this is an extraordinarily disruptive development in Euston and the surrounding area. It should be the role of government to defend its citizens; I would say that the citizens of Camden do not feel that they are being defended at the moment.

I will listen carefully to see whether the Minister is able to give us greater assurances than he was able to give in Committee. I am grateful to the noble Lord for the time he has given in meeting me to discuss various issues associated with this Bill. But I regret that f he is not able to give greater assurances, I am minded to divide the House on this amendment.

[Baroness O'Cathain]

My Lords, every time we talked about how to get the spoil from the site through to the rail holding, the fundamental issue we discussed was moving more by rail. The problem is that people think a great job was done with the Olympics and with Crossrail. As was pointed out by the proposer, the geography of the area from where the spoil would have to be removed means that it was nothing like as easy. In some cases it would take a double journey to get the spoil to the railway. Every sinew was strained to overcome this. I hope that some other noble Lords who were on the committee will say how it was; the first thought was getting the spoil to a railhead or to a railway and reducing the number of HGVs on the road. I am sure that there must be something in our report on this—I will find out.